


For The Memory Of It

by Pink_Siamese



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Dream Sex, F/M, Graphic Description of Corpses, One Shot, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, POV Male Character, POV Third Person Limited, Present Tense, Racism, Racist Language, Sexual Content, Walkers (Walking Dead)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-26
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2017-11-02 13:13:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/369347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pink_Siamese/pseuds/Pink_Siamese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the earliest days of the zombie apocalypse, Daryl Dixon crosses paths with a young woman hunting in the woods.</p>
<p>This is a one-shot, mostly a character study, that takes place just before and during the beginning of the first season.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Huntress

Though she is a small woman, she uses a longbow. She pulls forty pounds. Stretched to her limit, fleeting, she becomes the beauty of deadliness. The arrow is long and straight, released like a breath.

In her cave, in _the_ cave. Her thoughts. Down beneath the deep shadow of the woods, down where there is a curling pool of water so cold that it numbs the toes and bleaches their skins, she has guns. She oils them, takes care of them. She keeps her ammunition dry and wrapped up on a high shelf of rock. She keeps her guns but she does not use them.

A pheasant falls, rustling, a sound like leaves in the wind. The wings fold, a sound like tiny branches breaking.

*             *             *

They had found each other in the deep woods. They were tracking the same deer, a small doe, tan legs like a woman’s, tragic starlet thin and elegant in flight. He had had it backed it into a steep-sided glade when she came down over the rocks. The wind had turned. The scent of her hot skin had sent the doe into a panic it could not struggle out of. He took it down, a swift decision, arrow slicing through the pale curve of neck; she met him on the other side of the tree line. He had held the dappled body slung across his shoulders, long slim ankles tied together like a prisoner’s.

“You been tracking us,” he had said.

“Yeah,” she had replied, panting. “Til you all stopped moving and laid up at the quarry.”

“Why? Why not join up?”

She had looked away, then at the ground. “Dunno.”

Though he would not share the deer, he did allow her to lead him down through the descending woods, across the ragged backs of rocks and the softness of moss to the coldness of her pool. While later on he would allow much more, just then a gift of hidden water was enough of a truce between them.

*             *             *

The fire burns low, shielded from the dark by an overhang of stone.

“So you got good quick.” He watches her with his narrow horizon eyes, their color a faded blue like all the dawns she once slept through. “I guess everyone did, come down to it.”

She is restless. “I was good before but hunger makes getting better a whole lot easier.”

“Why won’t you use the guns?”

“They make noise.” She sighs, looks up. “Last walker I saw was downstream maybe a half mile and it was a couple of weeks ago. I want to keep it that way. They’re my dad’s. _Were_ my dad’s.”

He leans onto his side. “Would you if you had to?”

She tracks the features of his face. “Of course.”

“Uh huh.” He nods. “So you just keepin em, then.”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“The memory of it.”

Into his eyes moves a strange dark softness. “What kind of memory is that?”

She shrugs a shoulder. “The one I got.”

She watches him in the firelight. How to say she learned to shoot the bow because on summer nights her mother read stories of the huntress?

A little girl, in her memory, she is in bed beside the window. She looks up at the moon, watches it grow, swelling from the thin silver bow of the goddess into a roundness like fruits and polished coins. Time marches straight across the silver face, its curves receding, pulling tight until the bow points at the other side of the sky.

She knows he doesn’t know about the huntress. She sees it in his face.

He stands. She watches him unfold. He looks around the small cave, tells her that he wants her to come back to the quarry with him. He hesitates, holds out his hand.

“I know.” She doesn’t move. “I’ve been trying to figure out why you haven’t brought them here.”

“Don’t know.” The musculature of his arms hangs, long wrists loose. “I probably should, though.” His voice lowers. He glances at her face.  “It’s better for you.”

“If you do it I won’t be here. I’ll go find a house somewhere and hole up. It’ll be a bitch because water’s harder to come by in the ‘burbs but there are locks on the doors. I can board up the windows.”

He looks at the red firelight on her cheeks, the clear gleaming whites of her eyes. “Why you so tied into being alone?”

“I’ll make it work. Don’t think I can’t.”

“That ain’t what I said.”

*             *             *

He goes. He disappears into the spark-laced darkness and she hears an owl take off with a heavy rustle of branches. Then, the wind. Then nothing.

Later, sleeping wrapped up in her sleeping bag, embers worn down to nothing, on the cool floor of the cave, it is her little girl’s pillow that she remembers best: mouth-scented, cotton worn smooth like a grandmother’s skin, permeated with an odor of sleep strangled in dead flowers and old dresses.


	2. Not Just Any Living Skin

She looks at her face in the water, the rippling of it, the impermanence of her eyes and how the shape of her mouth bends with the currents. She thinks of herself as the girl. The dirt on her cheeks, creased into her knuckles, red dirt so much like blood. _How easy to release your own name_ , she thinks. She doesn’t like her name. It’s skanky, ghetto, a stripper’s name. It’s been made into something both cheap and meaningless. _And how easy it returns to you, carried to the surface of the water by the mouths of fish and left there like a prize_. It’s so much easier to tie the things that happened to her to “the girl” and carry them around that way.

The girl who came to Georgia one summer to spend it with her father. The girl who once rode a bike down a hill and got caught in barbed wire and made flower crowns for the crooked red scars. The girl who sang to moths at seven, held bees in her cupped hands at ten, who was once a student of life in the way that she was a student of other things—things that lived in books.

The girl, who hid on the roof and listened while the walkers ate her dogs and then her old fat cats who couldn’t run and then her stepsisters and then her stepmother and then her father. Walkers dressed in neighborclothes, wearing the rotting skins of summertime friends.

“I used my daddy’s gun to put im out of his misery and it brought the whole horde down on me,” she whispered, watching the smear of her mouth drift on the surface of the water. Her father’s praline chitlin accent creeps into her voice: “I couldn’t get the others in time so I run off and I don’t know where they are now but I sure didn’t want to see what had fallen upon them so I went upcountry and into the woods like I was taught.”

She squats, holding the story of it in her mind like an airy structure, reminiscent of a cube. It’s made of lightweight metal. Its corners are level on the level. _Like making a house_ , she thinks, sliding her hands into the water. She rests them on the backs of smooth rounded rocks. Her fingers ripple, going pale. _Building up the story of your life is just like making a house_.

She wants to be Artemis even though it is not her name. She wants to kiss the water and bid it take the name her parents gave her down to the sea where it would drown beneath the crushing outpour of a ravaged world. _I am the girl who would be the huntress_ , she thinks, _for the bow and the moon are the only things left in this world that matter_.

She shoulders the bow. It’s getting late, the sky silvering, crazy heat trapped in the trees and winding up the cicadas.

A wind twirls through the branches. She smells peculiar sweet ammoniac rot, old meat left in a spic and span bathtub and smothered with cherry blossoms. They’re upwind a good distance and the odor isn’t strong enough to be more than one or two; she leaves her water on the creekside and shoulders her fish and climbs a tree. She secures the fish to her belt and makes herself small in the branches. She waits. The dappled quality of the air, its movement of light and the slow surrender of it to the pewter dusk plays tricks with her eyes. A motion of branches, a rustle of leaves and the snap of a twig becomes the shape of a man. A runner, a climber, a shooter. Not a walker. She holds still, takes in a deep breath. Her eyes close as she prays for a whiff of living skin.

Not just any living skin.

The quarry is three miles away, down the jagged cut of growth. She remembers the first time she saw it: a teenage girl in a pickup truck full of cheap beers and cheaper bottles of wine and the sweat of boyskin and girlskin and all of it restless, signaling, wild like the new grass pushing its way up out of the ground. The girl who would be Artemis didn’t get fucked down there, even though it was an option; she didn’t get more than buzzed, did wander away from the flagrance of the bonfire to get closer to the darkness, to wrap herself up in that warm breathing Dixie darkness. She waded into water cold as the deep ground. It was comforting. The cold weighted the tendons in her feet and made them ache. She sat down on a rock and looked up. The stars were in the sky, bright and hard, even though the sky was bleached by light pollution. In her mouth bloomed a memory of watermelon wine, how it came from a big jug someone’s pa made, how someone stole it out of the woodshed.

She finds her balance. She braces against the trunk, reaches back, pulls an arrow long and slow. She nocks it, string humming against her hand and murmuring the promise of blood.

_But this blood will not be stilled because it isn’t moving_ , she thought. _It’s gone quiet, fallen into a slow nightmare sleep, but it isn’t dead_.

She sights down the arrow’s shaft. She listens to the blunder of walkers, the slow creak of the string pulling back, and her thighs ache and her ankles throb and she yearns from a cold place for the background stealthy footfalls she knows won’t come, they won’t be there, it’s too late in the day. The walkers stagger. Sometimes they almost look alive in their movements, particularly when they are struck down, and she wonders at the science of it, how nutrition navigates the metabolic pathways of rotten flesh, how nerve impulses hold together in a body where heat and rain and other inhospitable elements are relaxing myelinated cells into tatters.

There are two of them. She lets the arrow fly, hears the thunk of it fly through an empty eye socket and strike into the skull. It crumples, tatterdemalion and powdered in red claydust, legs disjointed; it isn’t pathetic until it hits the ground and she can see the supple writhing of a spine and the curve of twitching limbs and a woman’s long graceful hands dressed in ashen skin, fingers still wearing the wedding band, bright pink nail polish, and a thin bracelet of indeterminate metal.

Her feet grit against the bark and she takes another arrow, hopes there are only two. She looks around, counts five things she can see to give her mind a place to settle; five things, the points of a star saying _I am here_.

“Yellow pine,” she whispers, tracking the second walker. “Mimosa. That shadow there that looks like a straight-backed chair. A clump of tiny blue flowers. Bird call. Bird call.” Her fingers tightened. She pulled back the string. “Bird call.”

The second arrow releases like a breath. It flies through dappled light and pierces the walker in the throat. It utters a bubbling wrenching noise, wet, like the bellows of a furnace getting stuck. Loosely bolted fingers come up, bat at the feathered shaft.

Adrenaline flashes into the beat of her heart. Her mouth fills with a taste of flames. She yanks another arrow, nocks, draws, her arm flashing like a wing. She lets fly. It strikes the soft palate and as its knees unhinge all of her breath leaves her in a swoon, the wet inside her flesh sinking. Her limbs grow heavy. Her breath breaks apart, the beat of her heart striking the inside of her body, an insistent rapid taptaptap like a woodpecker working on her spine, her wrists, the insteps of her feet. Sweat fills up and floods her skin. She shivers in the tree, holding on, listening to the lowdown rustle of her breath, listening through it and through the swaying wind and the rustling leaves.

She unties her fish and jumps down.

Up close she inspects her kill the way her daddy taught her. The woman might’ve been young. The man was beyond her ability to guess. The man might’ve been a gas station attendant or some other thing that works in garages stacked full of cars and boats and things. The woman might’ve been vain. It looks like they’ve been walking a long time. There’s weathering in the man’s face, skin and musculature chipped off like paint, and she sees tiny mushrooms like eyes sprouting in a line up the woman’s neck. The girl shrugs, picks the tiny blue flowers and sprinkles petals into the eye sockets, into the mouth hanging open and speared down like a wound.

She retrieves her arrows and takes them down to the water. She washes them clean in the sand.

_Not just any living skin_.


	3. Shamhat

She kneels to do it. Her legs shake. Her hips feel loose in their sockets, her blood weakened by adrenaline.

_Why won’t you tell me your name?_

_It doesn’t matter. And it’s better because this way you can go back and pretend I don’t exist._

_Why in hell would I wanna do that?_

_So you can say look guys, I don’t even know her name. If anyone asks. If someone corners you. If someone’s all like I saw you in the woods that time with that girl where is she? What happened to her? I didn’t know her name, you can say, she was nobody._

_You are some kinda fuckin fucked-up, girl. Know that?_

She thinks about her limbs and their movements. She picks up the stringer of fish and throws it over one shoulder. She takes up the water. Her feet take her up the stream. Her mind far away, caught in a haze of blue, thinking about happy polished summer days with cotton candy clouds and sticky fingers and the green taste of pond water, she carries her bounty to the darkness of the cave. Imagines the glow of her skin subdued by the dark. She stows the fish in the water. She pushes their flat hard bodies down beneath the surface. Strung together on their fine line, the gills twitch against her fingers. She closes her eyes. She brushes water over them.

She imagines his lips on her neck. Hot mouth, angry mouth licking the words into her skin: what’s your name? She drops her face and shivers, the image moving down her back in strands of heat.

She stands, dries off her hands. She walks to the ledge, steps over the bucket, and takes down the bundle of guns. She holds them in the forever shade. Their weights and shapes take on the weights and shapes of her memory. She fears that to let one of them go is to let some aspect of her father go; here is the weight of her grandfather nestled into the great-grandfather before him, far back in the reaches of steam-hot southern history, the great-grandfather who broke away from _his_ slaveowning father but could not break away from the blood-red land. He took her great-grandma and trucked down to the Florida border and grew pecans instead. He built a cozy little house with his heart. He learned to love trees. He taught his son to shoot things.

She unwraps one, the shotgun, its stock smoothed by the palms of erased men. The barrel still smells hot. There is a box of shells. She leans the gun against the stone and squats and shakes the shells onto a square of cloth. She brings up the corners, ties them into a bundle. She hefts the weight of the shells in two curled fingers. She picks up the gun, hangs it across her back. From somewhere deep in the cave comes a quiet, steady, echoing drip of water.

* * *

In the blue air, on the silken breeze, the memory draws close:

_Haven’t you ever wanted to be someone else?_

_Throw your name away, go on ahead, but you’re still you. It ain’t that easy._

She walks through the darkening woods, getting all weird in the head: here, have this gun because I keep thinking about this red dirt and making metaphors with it, have my daddy’s gun because your ways are not my ways.

_Why not? What the hell do you know about it?_

_Ain’t no call for you to get snippy with me. I’m just sayin_.

She feels that alien feeling, dreamy and detached in the skeleton. The branches of the trees become strange in the falling dark. It’s buoyant, this northernness that the sultry heat and the cockroaches and Krispy Kremes and the confederate flags never managed to beat out of her.

Crickets carry a softer tune in the dark. Leaves rustle. Tree frogs shrill. The quarry road floats on the dark, white tinted a weak blue like water inside a bathtub. Kudzu and sumacs black except where they’ve been silvered by the moon. Far down, below the rustle and the chirrup and the trilling, a distant restlessness of water. She hears its slow soft kiss on the stone.

She doesn’t hear him come out of the woods. She never does. First the shadows are moving and then there’s moonlight on him and he’s hissing the words, sotto voce and with the force of rushing water: “The fuck you doin down here in the middle of the goddamned night?”

She looks up and feels the sound of it move through her, racing her blood. She halts. She’s in the middle of the road. Down below, orange light.

“I coulda killed you!” He strides forward, crossbow clasped in one hand. “You know what, maybe I should!” He stops in front of her, feet spread apart on the road, and he leans into her face. “Maybe I damnwell should! What do you think of that?”

She holds his eyes with her own as she unshoulders the shotgun. “Maybe you should keep your voice down.”

“I _am_ keepin my damn voice down!”

She tosses the bundle of shells toward his feet. “Then maybe you should shut up and take this.”

His eyes flick up and down the front of her body. He wipes his mouth with the side of his hand. He steps back. “I ain’t takin that from you.”

“Go on.” She holds the gun out with both hands. “Someone in your camp can use it. I don’t want to see it anymore.” She pauses. “I don’t want it with me anymore.”

His lips twitch in a feral way and he grabs her upper arm, jerking her forward, the tight suspension of his muscles popping inside his fingers. His nails disappear in the softness of her skin. Her breath goes choppy.

“You gonna take it or not?” she whispers.

Eyes lowering in the dark, gleaming into hers. “What you doin this for?”

Soft voice cut open like overripe fruit and pouring its juice down her throat. Words with tender downy skins.

“You want it or not?” she murmurs. The smell of the night is overpowering.

The girl who would be Artemis reaches up and draws the tips of her fingers along the pulse in his neck. His whole body jerks, like it was lightning, a million loose volts pouring into him and gluing his jaws together. His eyes widen. He grunts, forces his breath through his nostrils.

“Daryl,” she whispers.

His knuckles loosen.

She puts the gun on the gravel. Watching his face, standing up, she takes off her bow and arrows. She starts to unbutton her shirt. His eyes track the progress of her fingers. The stained fabric loosens down over her arms. She looks down, unclasps her bra. Her eyes close as the straps slide down over her shoulders and she listens to the erratic climb of his breath, the way it weakens, how it shallows up when the cups fall away from her breasts. She opens them and he’s shaking his head back and forth, slowly, taking a step back. He watches her nipples harden with the sudden change in atmosphere.

“Aw no.” He’s still shaking his head. He wipes his mouth. “Aw no, no. No. Naw.” His voice goes soft and weak. “What in the hell is this?”

She moves closer. “You don’t want it?”

He leans over and snatches up the shotgun. He shoulders it. “Not like this.”


	4. When The Water Stills

Her breasts float in the dark, nipples like unfocused eyes. Her face, adrift in shadow, surrenders its definition. “Like how, then?”

“Git gone, girl, and that is my last word on it.”

She looks down as she buttons up her shirt. “I don’t understand.” The tone of her voice splits open, turns sweet. It fills his mouth. He shivers. She moves toward him. “Help me to understand.”

Under his breath he hears the shift of dirt, of small branches yielding. “Someone’s coming.”

She goes still.

“Git.” He grips the shotgun. “You run like hell less you want someone to catch you.” He lowers his voice. “Shane’ll clip your wings for sure.”

“But isn’t that what you want?”

“Naw.” He turns his head, punctuates it with spit. “It ain’t.”

* * *

_Ever seen a dead nigger?_

Inside, Daryl’s much younger self shakes his head. There is shaking inside the shaking. His eyes squeeze shut. The world swims around him in a lazy circle.

_You wanna?_

Hot days pushed close to the ground, wet palms, a sweet stew of flowers: these things are imprinted on the single digit days of his childhood.

Back then Daddy plowed full throttle into the swamps. He chased the work down into guns and drugs, snakes, the threat of gators, into a primal landscape that would swallow you whole and leave you to rot, to ripen until you were tasty enough for eating. The spiritual terror of being trapped in the bodies of herons and the roots of hyacinths, nestled in the branches, hid between cypress knees. It surfaced in the night, carried in the cry of some small murdered thing. It was a stiffness in Daryl’s muscles, a chill wrapped tight around the bone.

They lived in a broken-down stilthouse, gap-toothed floor suspended fourteen bare inches over rank brown shallows.

Inside the memory, morning brings blinding white mists and the wet slithering sounds of water moccasins. Towering trees. The water is flat, smooth and quiet but for the barest shift of its surface, a noise like slow breathing. Three pirogues ride tether at the porch that is also a dock. They bump into one another, drift apart again, two of them dented in but still serviceable and the third rusted out, weighted down with teacolored water. Merle leans behind the door and grabs the fishing poles without speaking, skin pale and flabby in the harsh sun, lost hours inscribed in the deep blue of a swamp night beneath his eyes. The wooden porch creaks under his feet. Daryl watches him. Merle’s young, not even twenty, but already the broken and enraged years have taken up a tight, humming residence just beneath his skin.

On a sagging half-rotted couch, set out beneath the porch’s moss-covered roof, Daddy sleeps. He is a mountain of flesh, hair like underbrush struggling in the deep shade of a forest. Skin like mudslides. Breath like rotten meat and bread gone sour. Empty beercans roll, glittering in the hot light.

_Get your shit. We’re goin_.

Daryl nods and grabs his fishing rod and the pink plastic bucket.

Merle flings his stuff into one of the pirogues. He steps in. A bird screeches somewhere close by, taking off with a heavy beat of wings. Daryl looks up, squinting. It’s very bright, sunlight hammered into thin hot sheets. Daryl climbs toward the stern. He squats, bucket beside his knees, burning sunlight draped along his neck. Sweat rolls off the bridge of his nose. Merle pushes off with the paddle. The soft mud releases the pirogue, lifting it into the uneasy embrace of the water.

The pink bucket belongs to their little sister.

One day her mama showed up in a banged-up car with duct-taped cardboard for back windows and took her and Daryl never saw her again. The car was blue.

He was young, when he thinks about it he remembers the blue dusty flashes on the car amid huge rust stains and the cardboard flapping in the hot summer wind and thinking that the car looked like an old police car left forgotten in a field somewhere. How he pinched his penis shut, knees turned in because he had to pee so bad. But he wanted to see. Little Julie in the back seat, pale blond hair like fluff. He, Daryl, standing in the thin shade of a bedraggled pomegranate tree. That car backing up into a half-moon shape, making pink dust. Dirty Merle leaning out the kitchen window, pellet gun aimed at the taillights. How he shot at them, hateful words tortured by his screaming throat.

For awhile it was _it’s just a fuckin girl’s sandbucket you fuckin pussy_ and _you know what girls do right girls sweep the floors fetch the beers suck the dicks_ and one day Merle burned the edges of it with their daddy’s lighter but the plastic wouldn’t catch and after that it was just a grunt upon sight of the white handle in Daryl’s hands and finally, finally, it was nothing at all.

Mist rises up off the water in long thin tendrils. They drift further and further into the trees.

_Over here_. There’s excitement in Merle’s voice. _Over here, look, there it is, goddamn._ He laughs, high-pitched. _The gators ain’t got her yet._

Daryl’s skin crawls. He looks over the edge of the pirogue because Merle might whack him upside the head if he doesn’t, might knock him over into the water if he doesn’t. At first he looks into the water and only sees its still depths, shades of deep reddish-brown overlaid with the shadow-shapes of branches and knobby cypress knees. Then, floating up near the top, a snarl of…something. Merle pokes at it with the paddle, still cackling, his laughter wheezing in and out of a broken snicker and the high-pitched giggle of a nervous boy. Daryl’s brain struggles to register the sodden weight, long thin clumps of dark brown stuff clinging to itself. His heart starts to pound. There’s heat, heat everywhere, moist heat throbbing from the sky, rising up from the water, pushing out at his skin. Held down by the thick tree branches with their long beards of moss, it embraces him in a robe of sweat.

_Wh…wh-what happened to her head?_ Daryl whispers.

_It’s a fuckin weave, dummy. All those niggerbitches got em. You didn’t think those straight shiny hairs came natural, did you?_ Merle cackles some more. He wipes the sweat off his mouth. _Well did you?_

When the water stills, Daryl can see the curve of her upper teeth and the whites of her eyes and the undulant movements of the big flat-bodied fish nibbling on her cheeks. Big coils of chain hold her down, weight her limbs to the bottom.

_I dunno._

_You think if I jab at it one of her arms will come off?_

_Hey. That’s gross, man._

Merle has to pee. He gets up on his knees, aims at the dead girl’s face. All of his movements, his postures, are exaggerated. The arc of piss smells strong, the water smells a little like raw meat. He shows his teeth, chest moving like he’s laughing but with no sound coming out. Daryl hunkers into the stern, wonders if he got into the beer.

_You think the guy who killed her fucked her first?_

Daryl looks at his feet. In the moment, the darkness, he rubs his eyes.

* * *

The girl’s hand, soft, hesitant. Daryl doesn’t hear her feet on the road. Her fingertips brush his arm. The touch catches in his breath. It fills his skin, hums in the hairs.

“Come with me,” she murmurs. “Just for a little while. No one will know.”

“What you mean?” He’s whispering, voice low and scratching apart. He starts to turn. “What the hell are you on about now?”

“Not forever.” She’s close to him in the dark; he can smell woodsmoke and restless sleep caught in her hair. “Just for awhile. Like you did before.” She holds him with the long liquid of her gaze, its stillness and the promise sleeping beneath it. “Don’t you want to?”

A hand of his hovers over her wrist. He leans in close, speaks against her cheek. “You can’t be here. This ain’t a place for you.”

Her breath shallows. “Why not?”

With a fingertip he traces the shapes of her veins. She twitches and he rests a hand on the curve of her neck, the weight of it molding to the shape of her bones. “Shhh, now.” His lips are warm. “Shhhh.”

She moves her hands over his narrow hips, the rumpled pants heavy with dirt. A rim of bare skin. She breathes hard, puts her thumbs on their curves of bone. His nose slides alongside hers and she lifts her mouth. His moustache is softer than she thought it would be. He whispers it, breathing on her mouth, his breath heavy and hot with the scent of milk.

“What’s your name?”

“Brandy,” she pants.


	5. The Earth

She thinks _no one’s who they used to be, but everyone still has a little bit of their old self left behind somewhere inside_. His hand reaches out, moves like a curtain against her face.

Daryl remembers her voice, how it was back then, humbled by the air inside the cave.

_It’s a stripper name, I don’t like it._

He leaves the road, feels her eyes on him as he goes into the woods, the branches holding her gaze back. He climbs down through them to the camp and inside the softness of his footfalls he hears her voice: _Some people were made to live through this. It’s like an apocalypse comes and it incubates something inside you. The egg gets warm and ripe and before you know it this new thing is cracking out, busting up, making all kinds of trouble. But there’s strength there too. A wildness scorned in the old world but in the new it’s worth its weight in gold. That’s what I see in you._

Sometimes her words are ropes, tied loose and warm around him just so he can feel the strength of his own struggle. Other times they are anchors.

“Hey, nightrider.” Andrea’s at the fringes of the camp, just beyond the wavering edge of the firelight. He hears the crackle of low flame before he hears her half-whispered words: “Where do you go, anyway?”

Daryl looks at her, he takes in the insolent angles of her body and the way they contrast with her cheerleader face. He shoulders past her. “Not your business, now is it?”

Andrea turns. “I’ve seen her, you know.”

He halts. Tension strings across his shoulders. “What?”

“You heard me.” She comes up behind him. “I’ve seen her. The girl with the bow.”

“I think you should eat something.” He tosses the gun and the ammo to the ground. He glances back at her. “You startin to hallucinate or somethin.”

“I don’t think so.” She squats beside the coals. Her face is a map of rusty light. Her mouth curves into a soft smile. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

“There’s no secret so there’s nothin to worry about.” He hauls his pack close to the fire and begins to unstrap his bedroll.

Andrea watches him. “Sleeping outside again tonight?”

“What’s it damnwell look like?” He glares for a moment, turns his attention back to the sleeping bag. “And what of it,” he mutters. “I’m goddamned tired. I want some fresh air. Leave me alone.”

“As you wish.”

“I dunno,” he says, looking at his fingers. “You know how sometimes there’s like something...I dunno, hard to explain. Or whatever. I don’t fuckin know.”

“Yeah?”

He looks up. “What?”

“All kinds of things are hard to explain.” Andrea sits crosslegged. “Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.”

“It’s like...” Daryl’s words trail off into breath. He looks up at the sky for a long moment. “Sometimes, you know, a place is just bad. It’s just no good at all. But it’s only for some people. Others are fine, you know, they’s tough and hard in all the right places.” He looks at her. “To make it happen. They can make it work.”

Andrea nods. “Okay.”

“But some people just don’t belong. It’s like a…” He gestures at the fire. “One a them china statues left down in a mine where there’s all kinds of digging and blasting and shit like that.”

She watches his face. “You mean like they’re going to break.”

“Maybe they will and maybe they won’t,” he mutters. He hunches his shoulders and picks up a stick and uses it to jab at the coals before flinging it aside with a snort. “But it’s more likely cause of what you’re made of and where you are. It’s not just one thing.” He looks at her. “It’s the two things together.”

“Okay,” says Andrea, leaning back onto her hands. She nods. “I see.”

Daryl scratches the back of his neck. “That’s all.” He glances at her. “That’s it.”

She lifts her chin. “So where’d you get the gun?”

He looks at it. He glances at her and turns away. “I had it.” He spreads out the bedroll. “All along. You just didn’t see it.”

“Is that so.”

“Yeah, it’s goddamned so,” he snaps. “Besides, it’s a good idea just in case. You know that.”

“So she gave it to you, then.” Andrea tilts her head. “I wonder why.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Daryl unslings his crossbow and leaves on the ground alongside the bedroll and he lays the gun beside it. He puts the bullets beside the pillow. He lowers himself onto the blankets and slings one arm over his eyes. “And that is my last word on it.”

He listens to her feet hit the ground and hears the way they make circles, restless, her indecision churning up the night, and once or twice he can smell her and feel the passage of her body against his skin but after awhile the night-noises rise up and all he hears is air moving through leaves, the distant water, the shrillness of crickets lost in sensual dreams of summer darkness.

Daryl dreams about waiting for sleep. He dreams about Andrea’s restless prowling and waits for her to do something, he smells it on her, he has always smelled it the way animals do, her need to press past propriety, to move up against his skin. Crickets follow him down into dreams of being naked in the woods, of being lost among the tall thin trunks. He’s not really lost, though; he’s adrift, a man who’s shipped his oars, who knows the lake he’s on the way he knows his own face but has surrendered to its mist-ridden surface. It’s dark and blue, the sky heavy, the shadows black and deep. It’s cooler than it should be, he smells leaves and dark soil that never sees a full day of sun, winter rain sliding down a pink rock face. He hears water moving over stones, muttering in its endless labor, passing in and out of darts of heavy white light, moving under strong white heat.

A warm red firelight fills the low-hanging cave’s mouth. He rests a hand on its smooth cold stone as he ducks inside. Sharp goosebumps rise to his surface.

Brandy’s place, her nest, is built deep in the earth.

The tangled pile of her hair moves. The gleam of her eyes, trapped in the reddened dark, meets his look. At his approach she moves onto her back and he kisses her, her hand is over his, pressing the heat of her sleepy face against his chilled fingers. He pulls back the covers, climbs over her. With the shift of her body, her mouth opens. She sighs into his breath and he puts a hand on her forehead, runs it over the texture of her hair. Her breath comes harder. Her kisses are slow, strong. They keep him balanced on a sharp hinge of sensation.

She brings his face down into her smooth skin. She smells like rain, salt, summer heat leaking out of sun-drenched rock. Beneath the touch of his hands her chest rises and falls, rises and falls; her breath is loud and hot in the dark like wings struggling, struggling, struggling to ascend. His mouth closes over the dip between her collarbones. His tongue slides into the valley of her skin. His hair brushes her and she shivers.

He wants to talk in this dream, the words are waiting soft and half-woven in his throat but he can’t, he’s sealed against her, his mouth is full of her body, her eager sweat, the tight points of her nipples. He maps out their shapes with the flat of his tongue. Goosebumps sweep up through her skin, texturing it. He takes her hips into his hands and they buck into him, the long muscles in her thighs taut and thick.

 _Pull me down_ , he thinks from beneath the sweet press of her, the song of her skin, the avalanche of her flesh, _oh Lord yes, pull me down under to where you are, down beautiful._ His dick finds her tight slickness and the furnace of her blood grips him. He gasps into the movement of her body and arches in order to breathe, rides it all the way down into the depths of the earth.


End file.
